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After enjoying Arthur Benjamin doing his mathemagics, I thought I’d give it a try for myself. I wrote a little software and gave it a go. Join me and you’ll find out why I’m not a mental calculator, but that anyone can do it if they know the trick.
Here’s a link to the ted talk in question:
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You could be better at doing math than you might think. There are methods that allow one to do tricks with numbers that seem just across the street from flat out impossible.
Watch as Arthur Benjamin shows us how one can calculate in ones head, sometimes faster than one could use a calculator.
Arthur Benjamin: A performance of “Mathemagic”
Approximately 10 minutes and 42 seconds into that first video, he uses some variant or another of the major system in order to hold some numbers in his mind, while he works on others. Have a look at the major system and how it works.
Finally, Arthur Benjamin shows us how to do a couple of mental math methods. The tricks are surprisingly easy to use. Impress your friends and scare your neighbors!
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Today’s episode is just to point you at an interesting ted talk. I don’t say much other than that you should check out this link. So, check out this link.
A mouse. A laser beam. A manipulated memory.
It’s about 15 minutes long, and it explains how they used a laser to play with memories within the brains of mice. No, really!
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Today, we examine the method of placing things you wish to remember within a place that you hold in your mind.
For background, here’s a roughly 9-minute ted talk on systems in your brain related to memory, and how your brain keeps track of where you are, or even, where you imagine you are.
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Today is an introduction to Mnemonics—methods you can use to improve your memory.
Here’s a 20-minute Ted talk that explains the topic nicely, including how one method works.
And here are no less than three separate wikibooks that let you find out how many of the mnemonic methods work, and how you can use them.
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It’s Monday, and I thought I’d recap what happened last week. (Who knows what you were up to this weekend.)
Here’s the link I added to episode 1’s show page, just because.
Comparison of the effects of unilateral and bilateral eye closure In cortical responses in kittens.
And here’s the link from Friday, as I talk more about synesthesia without bothering to explain what it is again.
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Today we chat about synesthesia, wherein one sense can trigger another. Checkout the 4-minute video I found that tells you all about it.
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Plants grow differently in different gravity, and the brains of kittens develop differently when deprived of vision. So, what about those pesky humans?
Here’s an article from Scientific American about differences in the brains of those who lose their hearing or sight at an early age.
Super Powers for the Blind and Deaf – Scientific American
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Here’s an article that showed me that something I thought was true, wasn’t so:
plants do grow in zero gravity.
Plants growing in space is interesting, So how about some YouTube videos about them.
The first:
Cultivating Plant Growth in Space
Is about five minutes long. It was put out by NASA in 2015.
The second and last:
plants in space
Was put out by the Australian Academy of Science in 2016, and last for more than an hour and a half. It includes three speakers. The first speaks about growing plants in controlled environments, including space and commercial applications. The second speaker tells us about different lighting requirements for controlled environment plant growth, and the advantages of using LED style lighting. The last speaker tells us about when actual plants were grown in actual space, on the ISS–International Space Station.
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In order to make you, and I mean you specifically, we need your DNA, every last thing that has happened to you, and all your cells that have come and gone during all that time.
Here’s the article I mention in the episode:
That study was about kittens with one eye closed, and mostly about searching for the critical period of sight development. An earlier paper by the same authors studied the difference in the brains of cats reared with one eye, verses two eyes kept shut.
Comparison of the effects of unilateral and bilateral eye closure In cortical responses in kittens.
And you may as well have Wikipedia’s take on epigenetics.
And I’ll end with a quote from the study on kittens.
”
In considering the possible implications of studies like the present one for human development it is important to stress that in the cat, within the critical period between the fourth and eighth weeks, a deprivation as brief as a few days can have marked effects. This implies that for normal development normal environmental conditions must prevail throughout the critical period and not just during some small part of it.
”
Next time, space plants.